Inconsolata: Quality Free and Open Font for Programmers

Inconsolata PreviewIf you spend a significant amount of time working with any type of scripting, code, or markup, then you’re probably looking at a monospace (fixed-width for each character) font.

The quality of these fonts varies, though the defaults that ship with Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista are quite good. The Consolas font included with Vista is particularly good.

Fortunately, there is a quality free/open alternative. Raph Levien has developed a great programming font cleverly called Inconsolata. I have been using it as my primary terminal/coding/text font for several months and find it superior to anything else I’ve used.

Incosonata is freely available under the Open Font License. The OpenType version of Inconsolata will work on all major platforms. There is also a PFA version available.

Font geeks can download the Inconsolata FontForge source file and a PDF sample is available.

Here’s a quick screenshot of Inconsolata used in a simple PHP file on my desktop.

 

19 thoughts on “Inconsolata: Quality Free and Open Font for Programmers

  1. Willem, that PHP screenshot is actually from the terminal (Gnome Terminal) on Fedora 7 Linux.

    You’re right about the XP rendering. That is pretty blurry. At least it’s open-source, so it might get better.

  2. I can’t get the OpenType version of the font to import into Hummingbird Exceed. Anyone managed this, or know why?

  3. Have downloaded this font from 2 sources-both refuse to install-50% installation then message font file may be damaged.

  4. Please…… can anyone tell me if there’s a modified version for windows?

    This font looks all washed-out on XP….. maybe someone changed it to look better in windows?

  5. Thank U, Codeur !!! The version you pointed to works superb on my XP machine.

    One point, though — I had to install Mercurial to download the font from Google font repository. Does anyone know of a better way?

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